Top tips

Customise a complimentary webinar for prospective clients to show them how it works.

In-person seminars can be labour intensive and costly. They often don’t pay the dividends they should. Switching to webinars to deliver your message enables you to reach a diverse audience that can learn at a more comfortable pace.

Sandi Givens, founder of Transforming Teams, a successful business coaching enterprise in Victoria has found webinars to be increasingly effective. She advocates the use of webinars in up to 75% of her training and coaching services. For Sandi, webinars offer effective learning that delivers results using processes that are simpler, easier and faster.

Why webinars?

Sandi believes that the modern workforce is more receptive to online training. ‘The traditional mindset is to send employees off for a day somewhere, fill them with a shot of motivation, and then expect them to return to work ready to apply that information. But human beings don’t work that way; we need to learn small amounts over a period of time.’ For audiences, being able to digest information slowly and remotely is more effective.

Other outstanding benefits of webinars relate to time, money and travel. There’s no need to go off-site, which keeps expenses to a minimum, and this helps the environment by not contributing to carbon miles.

Convince with a demo

Often Sandi finds her clients resistant to the idea of new technologies. To overcome this, Sandi offers prospective clients a complimentary demonstration to show how web-based delivery works as an effective transfer of learning. Putting the technology into practice with a tailor-made solution is a great way to keep clients’ reservations at bay.

Be confident and offer a guarantee

Sandi recommends offering a 100% satisfaction guarantee. In Transforming Teams, Sandi is so confident that if a client isn’t happy, not only do they not pay but Sandi also pays them 10% of her quoted fee to compensate for their time. She believes this strategy opens people up to giving webinars a go. Sandi also offers webinar support via emails, web information and phone for added client reassurance.

Create engaging content

With no specialist training in webinars, Sandi was self-taught. For those starting out, Sandi recommends exploring the programs GoTo Webinar,Skype and Vimeo. And attend as many webinars you can to make sure what you deliver is engaging. Sandi says, ‘The number of times I’ve exited a webinar after 15 minutes shows me what not to do, what to avoid.’ If you immerse yourself in the technology and practice your techniques, webinars are a great way to reduce costs and maximise productivity for your clients and business.

The result

Delivering up to 75% of her team training and coaching services online, has helped free up Sandi's time in traveling to her clients' workplaces. It has also helped her clients to avoid Sandi's travel expenses.